Exemplary embodiments of the present invention relate to a system, a program, and a method to generate visual-guidance information on how the line of sight is guided. Exemplary embodiments further provide a system, a program, and a method to generate visual-guidance information in which the system can be reduced in size and cost and which ensure a proper eye flow.
Design-oriented documents in which layout elements (a title, an image, text, etc.) are laid out to be easily readable, such as catalogs, can be referred to as visual documents. Since a lot of specialized information may be required to create the visual documents, they are difficult for general businesspersons to prepare. Accordingly, preparation of visual documents is often outsourced to designers having expertise in design.
When producing visual documents, designers produce easy-to-read layout by arranging semantically continuous layout elements in the direction in which reader's line of sight flows (hereinafter, referred to as an eye flow). For example, assuming that one article is composed of a title, an image, and text, it is preferable to arrange them in that order. Thus, designers rearrange layout elements so as to provide easy-to-read layout through trial and error. Since designers predict the eye flow by intuition or experience, it is difficult to detect it quantitatively.
The art for detecting the eye flow and its related art include, for example, a line-of-sight information analyzer disclosed in related art document JP-A-6-162, an attention-region extraction device disclosed in related art document JP-A-2001-126070, and a saliency evaluation model disclosed in related art document Shoji Tanaka, Seiji Inokuchi, Yuichi Iwadate, and Ryohei Nakatsu, “Gazouryoiki no iro oyobi texture no contrast wo tokuchoryo to shita zuryoiki no tyusyutsu (A Figure Region Extraction Method Based on the Color and Texture Contrasts of Image Regions as Assumed Features)”, the journal of Information Processing Society of Japan, Vol. 40, No. 8, 1999.
According to the invention described in related art document JP-A-6-162, eyeball movement is detected by an eyeball movement detector, the time-series change of the eyeball detected by the analyzer is analyzed in a frequency domain, and the content of a display image inputted from an image input section is analyzed by a display-content analyzer, which are integrally processed by an integrated analysis section, and thus high-reliability data on the mental state of a subject and objective evaluation of the image is provided.
The invention described in related art document JP-A-2001-126070 includes an attention-region extractor, an image generator, and a composition determination device. The image generator generates the original panoramic image from a picture photographed by a camera. The attention-region extractor extracts an attention region from the original image provided from the image generator. That is, the devices evaluate the original image according to human subjectivity by the physical features of the original image and extract an attention region from the evaluation. The composition determination device cuts out the extracted attention region and its adjacent image region from the original image with reference to data on a picture drawn by a painter or a photograph taken by a photographer, stored in a memory. Briefly, the device can cut out the regions in the same composition as the picture image or the photographed image.
Related art document Shoji Tanaka, Seiji Inokuchi, Yuichi Iwadate, and Ryohei Nakatsu, “Gazouryoiki no iro oyobi texture no contrast wo tokuchoryo to shita zuryoiki no tyusyutsu (A Figure Region Extraction Method Based on the Color and Texture Contrasts of Image Regions as Assumed Features)”, the journal of Information Processing Society of Japan, Vol. 40, No. 8, 1999 describes the concept of saliency introduced in the invention of related art document JP-A-2001-126070 and its concrete calculation method.